Kirk Cameron is confused. Perhaps it is the company he keeps.

Kirk Cameron has lately offered some outrageously faulty logic regarding Halloween. According to Cameron, Halloween was originally a Christian holiday that has since been co-opted by Satan worshippers.

“Early on, Christians would dress up in costumes as the devil, ghosts, goblins and witches precisely to make the point that those things were defeated and overthrown by the resurrected Jesus Christ,” Cameron told The Christian Post. “The costumes poke fun at the fact that the devil and other evils were publicly humiliated by Christ at His resurrection. That’s what the Scriptures say, that He publicly humiliated the devil when He triumphed over power and principality and put them under his feet.”

Cameron then goes on to confuse pagans with Satanists, and claim that they have tried to steal the holy day from Christians.

“Over time you get some pagans who want to go, ‘This is our day, high holy day of the Satanic church,’ that this is all about death, but Christians have always known since the first century that death was defeated, that the grave was overwhelmed, that ghosts, goblins, devils are foolish has-beens who used to be in power but not anymore. That’s the perspective Christians should have.”

“The real origins have a lot to do with All Saints Day and All Hallows Eve,” Cameron said. “If you go back to old church calendars, especially Catholic calendars, they recognize the holiday All Saints Day, with All Hallows Eve the day before, when they would remember the dead. That’s all tied in to Halloween.”

Cameron’s retrofitting of the “real origins” of Halloween just don’t measure up to history.

The History Channel website explains Halloween as “evolving from the ancient Celtic holiday of Samhain. The Celts used the day to mark the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter, and also believed that this transition between the seasons was a bridge to the world of the dead.”

In fact, All Saints’ Day (All Hallows’ Day) was originally celebrated on May 13, starting in A.D. 609. There were no masks of ghouls. The date was changed in A.D. 835 to November 1. The already-long-existing Samhain celebration, which did feature the trappings of the dead and masks, became “Christianized” as All Hallows’ Eve, or Hallowe’en.

The “Satanic Church,” which Cameron fallaciously equates with paganism, was not established until 1966. As for their use of Halloween as a “high holiday,” their own policies state:

“There is no worship in Satanism. Animal sacrifice is not permitted in Satanic rites and ceremonies… Since Satanism is a self-centered religion, the highest holiday of the year would be the Satanist’s own birthday, which needs no ritual but should be spent in doing things a Satanist would enjoy. There is no requirement that a Satanist celebrate any holidays, and there are no hard and fast traditions or rites associated with them. Since Satanism embraces Nature, the other holidays a Satanist might choose to celebrate would be the seasonal turning points marked by the equinoxes and solstices – the dates of which vary from year to year, as well as the mid points between these which can be recognized as the climaxes of each season. In particular, April 30th, called Walpurgisnacht, is the Spring climax and the anniversary of the founding of the Church of Satan and is generally noted. Halloween, October 31, is the Fall climax and may be celebrated as a time when one’s inner-self might be explored through the use of a costume, or one might recall those of importance in one’s life who have died – as was done on that night in European tradition.”

So, Satanism’s use of the Halloween holiday has nothing to do with worshipping Satan, nor is it “all about death.”

Back in 2006, Cameron’s comrade-in-arms, Ray Comfort, told the world that he could prove there was a Creator. He said the humble banana was all the proof he needed.

“Behold, the atheists’ nightmare!”, Comfort declared, then proceeded to highlight different features of a common banana as proof of intelligent design by God. Comfort pointed out:

* The banana is shaped to fit into the human hand.
* It comes with a protective, non-slip surface to hold, which is also biodegradable and sits “gracefully” over the human hand.
* It is curved towards the face for ease of consumption and does not squirt in one’s face during the act.
* There is a “pull tab” at the “top” for easy access.
* It has a simple colour code to show ripeness: Green; too early. Yellow; just right. Black; too late.

Soon after Comfort released his “findings”, many people were quick to point out that he had forgotten one critical fact about that banana: It has been genetically modified through centuries of breeding and artificial selection. It has, indeed, been intelligently “designed”, not by any higher power, but by growers.

Bananas in their original form are small, hard pods with inedible seeds. To exist and look the way they do now requires constant grower intervention. These bananas do not even have reproduction capability since they have no seeds. Without a person to intentionally transplant cuttings, they would quickly die out entirely.

Cameron and Comfort are also famous for “editing” Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species classic, omitting parts that conflict with their Creationism views, and adding a foreword to try to convince their target college student audience that the book was false.